


with every heartbeat I have left, I will defend your every breath

by theyellowumbrella



Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: Anxiety, Depression, F/F, Self Harm, but also gooey love erim, check tags for triggers, self hate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-24
Updated: 2016-07-24
Packaged: 2018-07-26 11:40:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7572784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theyellowumbrella/pseuds/theyellowumbrella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And then she meets Jillian Holtzmann, and something just clicks. The first words she ever speaks to Erin are completely ridiculous — “Come here often?” — but Erin supposes that’s fitting because Holtzmann herself is completely ridiculous.</p><p>She likes to dance wildly and she likes to lipsync to her favourite ‘80s songs, and she’s like a thunderstorm and Erin absolutely loves it, soaks it all in, and she can feel herself stretching her smile so wide when Jillian’s dancing to DeBarge that it feels foreign.</p>
            </blockquote>





	with every heartbeat I have left, I will defend your every breath

**Author's Note:**

> I had no wifi this weekend, so I knocked this out. Unfortunately, the lack of wifi left me unable to rewatch the movie, so I've only watched it once and the characterisation is all over the place. 
> 
> HEAVY TRIGGER WARNINGS!!! Please don't read if you're sensitive to self harm, anxiety, depression and all around mental health issues. and if you do read, please continue at your own discretion.

Erin’s only eight years old when her next door neighbor dies. Mrs. Henderson had been a horrible woman, but she cries all the same when she hears the news, and buries her face into her mother’s chest.

“Is Mrs. Henderson in heaven?” she asks with the wide, unblinking naïvety of the eight year old little girl she is.

And her mother doesn’t have the heart to tell her that she thinks no, Mrs. Henderson probably isn’t in heaven, so she just smiles and nods with pursed lips.

“Yes, dear. Yes, I suppose she is.”

* * *

The first time it happens, she’s convinced it’s all in her head. Mrs. Henderson did just die, after all, and Erin reasons that it’s perfectly natural for her to see Mrs. Henderson afterwards. She reckons it’ll go away in a few days.

It’s seventeen days after the death of Mrs. Henderson, and eleven after her funeral, and she’s still seeing the old woman’s figure at the end of her bed. That’s when she knows something must be wrong.

* * *

She gets put on anxiety meds when she’s thirteen years old. It’s been four years since she saw Mrs. Henderson last, three since she got put in therapy, and one since the people at school found out and started the nickname Ghost Girl.

She’s been having panic attacks for as long as she can remember, but she’s always managed to keep it concealed. She can calm herself down, she knows she can, and she can handle it without the help of any adults, thank you very much.

This plan works for five years until she cracks in the middle of a therapy session. She’s sitting with her head facing the ground, and Dr. Hyde is trying to coax the story out of her about the last time that she ever saw Mrs. Henderson, and she ends up sobbing into the shoulder of a stiff man who has a degree in psychology and a PhD but cannot for the life of him stop her from shaking uncontrollably with her head in her hands and her body jerking violently with sobs.

The next week, she’s sitting primly on the edge of the cracked leather sofa in Dr. Hyde’s office when he tells her he’s prescribing her anxiety medication and gives her a referral to someone more advanced with dealing with it, because he’s known her for three years now and he’s never seen her break down that bad.

The kids at school find out when she drops the packet her mother forces her to carry with her everywhere out of her jacket pocket, and she scrambles to look for it but someone’s already got it and “Ghost Girl’s a pill popper!”

* * *

 

She meets Abby when she’s sixteen years old. She’s a new transfer to the school, and Erin gets assigned to show her around. At first, she thinks that maybe this is an opportunity to make a new friend, but she quickly realises that that’s wishful thinking, and she’s just being stupid again.

She doesn’t look up once as she directs Abby around the school, able to tell exactly where she’s going from memory. She tugs down on the sleeves of her cardigan and prays to God Abby won’t ask her about it.

She never does.

“Why won’t you look at me?” Abby asks finally, though. “I don’t bite, you know.”

She looks up, finally, and Abby greets her with a warm smile and kind eyes and she can feel the want for a companion aching desperately inside of her again.

“I … I don’t have a lot of friends. None. I have no friends,” is what she ends up saying, instead of what she wants to say, which would be something about anxiety and nerves and the fact that eye contact can be difficult, sometimes.

“Oh, well that’s just not true!” Abby declares. Erin furrows her brow in confusion, unsure of where Abby must be going with this, because she’s been alive for sixteen years now and her only friend as a kid was her other neighbour, Braden, and he’d bolted pretty quick when she told him about seeing Mrs. Henderson. Now, Braden is one of the boys who sits on the sidelines jeering on the people who shove her into lockers and yank at her sleeves. He thinks that it’s okay because he’s not directly bullying her, or even saying anything to her, but he always sits and laughs when they call her Ghost Girl, and he never defends the person he once sat in a treehouse with for four hours talking about how they would be friends forever.

But that’s how life goes, she supposes. Shit happens, people change. She learned that life was in no way fair a long time ago, and one boy who used to be her favourite person and is now one of her least won’t change that. She doesn’t in any way dwell on the fact that Braden was her best friend and then her nothing, because she supposes she understands.

He’s on the football team, and she’s the girl who saw a ghost every day for a year and is stuck on medication for anxiety and depression. It’s okay. She gets it. If she were Braden, she wouldn’t want to be her friend, either.

“What are you talking about?” she asks Abby.

“Well, I’m your friend now, silly!”

And that’s the story of how Erin and Abby become best friends.

* * *

“Erin, it’s a hundred degrees out,” Abby says, exasperated. “You can’t wear long sleeves! You’ll melt to death!”

“Look, I’ll be fine,” Erin says, sick to death of arguing with Abby over the same useless thing. “I’m a naturally cold person, anyway!”

“Erin, what’s going on? If this is about weight or something, I swear to God I will cut you —” Erin winces at her choice of words, hoping that Abby doesn’t notice. Abby, of course, _does_ notice.

“Erin …” she trails off. “Oh, Erin. Jesus. Please tell me you didn’t —” She yanks Erin’s arm and harshly pulls the sleeve up, revealing a neat line of scars running up and down Erin’s arm. Most of them are faded, although still noticeable, but there are two off to the side that are still red and look fresh — like they’d hurt to run your fingers over.

“Erin, why didn’t you … why didn’t you _tell_ me?”

Erin shrugs, a lopsided frown edging on the ends of her lips. “It was a long time ago.”

“Erin, we’ve been best friends for three years! I just don’t understand how you could keep something like that from me,” Abby says, clearly hurt.

“I haven’t done it since I was sixteen, Abby,” Erin says, but her voice wavers and Abby’s looking at the two little red scars that look almost timid in comparison to the others lining her arm. “I’m over it, okay? I’m better now.”

“Erin, I know you’re lying to me.”

“I’m not,” she insists, but her voice cracks, and all of a sudden she’s in Abby’s arms even though it’s stifling heat and they’re both sticky with sweat. She’s crying into Abby’s neck, mumbling apologies over and over again until her throat is sore. Abby sits and runs her fingers through Erin’s hair as comfortingly as she can, trying her hardest to comfort her crying best friend.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” Erin says when she finally calms down. “I know I should have, but I just — I didn’t want you to think I was crazier than you already knew I was.”

“You are not crazy,” Abby says firmly. “You’re Erin Gilbert, and you are not crazy, okay? You’re just a little … mentally challenged, at times.”

“Jesus, Abby!” Erin exclaims, but she laughs anyway and she’s grinning along with her best friend in minutes.

* * *

She knows what her parents think about ghosts — knows that if they hear that she’s getting so heavily involved again that they’ll flip, because she never once told them all throughout high school what her and Abby would talk about most of the time. She knows that if they knew she was writing a book about ghosts they’d bung her right back in therapy, and she’d be a nervous ten year old girl sitting in Dr. Hyde’s cramped little office all over again.

“Did you ever think that we would be doing this?” she asks Abby once. It’s two in the morning and they’re sitting on their dorm room floor surrounded by research papers — mostly written by them, granted — and articles about ghost sightings. Their room is a complete mess, but the sight fills Erin with a happiness she doesn’t think she’s ever experienced.

“What, staying up until the middle of the night sitting on the floor contemplating our entire lives? Sure, that’s a regular Wednesday night for us.”

Erin smiles but shakes her head. “No, I mean … you know, _this_ ; writing a book. Actually following up on all those years of talking about it. I mean, I know we always said we would, but it was one of those things that was never really going to happen. Except now it’s happening.”

“It’s happening, Erin,” Abby says with a wide smile. She’s just as giddy as Erin is, and even if it’s two in the morning and they have a 7 A.M. lecture in the morning, she’d rather be here than anywhere else in the world.

(Except maybe, actually capturing a ghost.

That would be pretty cool).

* * *

Erin is twenty nine years old and she’s so goddamn _alone_. Sure, she’s a professor at Columbia, well on her way to tenure in the next few years, but that’s all she really has.

She hasn’t seen Abby in three years, and her new therapist, Dr. Williams, put her back on her meds six months ago because she had called her at three in the morning crying and crying and crying and choking on her tears because she’d worried herself so much that she had ended up throwing up out of her sheer anxiety at being alone for so long.

Erin Gilbert is a mess, to put it in the simplest of terms.

She rolls up her sleeves — it’s been nineteen years now since she first sliced through her own skin but she can’t remember the last time she wore short sleeves — and looks at the pale arm in front of her.

It’s cleared up now, for the most part. She knows that nobody would really be able to tell she used to self-harm by looking at her arm, but as soon as she sees it it’s as if she’s a teenager again and she’s staring down at the blood on her arms and crying so hard she thinks she might die. She can see the memories of every scar — it feels so real, sometimes, when she looks down at it. She can run her finger up and down it and she swears to God she can feel the bumps of a new cut even if she hasn’t gone near it in years.

It’s been fifteen years since she stopped, but it still hurts so much to even look at her arm. She remembers the shame of having to cover herself up like it was just yesterday; the fear of her parents finding out.

Sometimes she wonders if she would ever touch a blade to her skin again if she were a weaker person. She reckons she most likely would. She also reckons that there’s a possibility of it happening in the near future.

She’s typing out a text to Abby before she knows what she’s doing, fingers hitting the keys at rapid pace. She can’t see very well through her tears, but autocorrect cleans most of it up.

_I’m really sorry Abby I should have done better. You deserved a better best friend._

She never sends the text.

* * *

She’s almost okay again and then she discovers that Abby’s been out publishing that shitfest of a book, and she can feel everything around her crumbling because she _knows_ Abby and she just knows that she isn’t going to magically agree to stop selling it. She almost has her fucking tenure and more importantly, she almost has her fucking life together, and everything is breaking and nothing is solid anymore.

So, she braces herself for the onslaught of verbal abuse sure to come when she sees Abby again. She knows her well enough by now to know that Abby Yates is passionate above all else, and that she treasures loyalty so highly it’s unbelievable. Erin betrayed her. Erin betrayed ten years of friendship, and she knows that she’s not going to get off easy.

She’s completely ready for another bad day — so much so that she’s got blankets and her favourite movie and chocolate and a bottle of her favourite soda on standby by her bedside table. She knows they’re just distractions, but they work.

And then she meets Jillian Holtzmann, and something just clicks. The first words she ever speaks to Erin are completely ridiculous — “Come here often?” — but Erin supposes that’s fitting because Holtzmann herself is completely ridiculous.

She likes to dance wildly and she likes to lipsync to her favourite ‘80s songs, and she’s like a thunderstorm and Erin absolutely loves it, soaks it all in, and she can feel herself stretching her smile so wide when Jillian’s dancing to DeBarge that it feels foreign.

(Even if she does start a fire).

She winks a lot and sends casual flirty comments as if it’s second nature, and maybe it is and maybe Erin’s looking too much into things but she can feel herself getting in too deep too fast already, but Jillian is a spitfire and she’s so beautiful and she’s everything Erin wishes she could be.

She’s never been consciously attracted to women before. Not really, anyway. I mean, sure, they were times in high school where she would space off in Spanish class and daydream about her teacher, but that woman continues to be one of the most beautiful women Erin’s ever seen, so she stands by that.

Holtzmann, however, is a whole other level.

Erin watches in amazement as Jillian starts impromptu dance parties at the worst of times, and as Jillian creates the most ridiculous inventions ever that are also the most fantastically brilliant things she’s ever seen in her life, and as Jillian will sit and read for one hour of her day exactly and then drop the book no matter where she is, and as Jillian — Erin watches everything Jillian does with amazement, really.

She becomes absolutely smitten with this woman, who is funny and ridiculous and absolutely beautiful, yet strangely sexy in a way that lets you know she absolutely has no intention of being so.

Jillian Holtzmann is an utter enigma, and Erin feels like she’s in love.

* * *

 

“So, Holtzmann, huh?” Abby asks one day. She doesn’t say anything more, but Erin already knows what she means, knows what she’s implying, and it’s a little bit ridiculous how transparent she apparently is, but she lets out a defeated sigh and doesn’t even bother denying it.

“Is it really that obvious?”

“Well, to _me_ it is, but that’s because I’ve known you for over fifteen years. Holtz and Patty have only known you a couple months, so it probably wouldn’t be all that glaring to them.”

“Oh,” Erin says. “Oh, well that’s good.”

“Yeah.” There’s a silence between them that isn’t exactly awkward but it isn’t exactly not awkward, either. “So, how long have you been hot for Holtz?” Abby asks, cracking a grin.

“Abby!” Erin exclaims. She slaps Abby on the arm, but she ends up laughing along with her anyway. “I am not … _hot_ , for her. I just … I like her, y’know? She’s … she’s good for me.”

“You ever gonna tell her?”

Erin laughs awkwardly, shaking her head. “Oh, now, see that — that is a different story.”

“Well, you can’t just keep it a secret,” Abby says, clearly astounded that Erin would think of keeping such a thing from Holtz.

“It’s just a little crush,” Erin says. “I’ll be over it soon.”

* * *

It’s been exactly a year since Erin turned up at the doorstep of Holtz and Abby, and she’s learned exactly three thing since then:

1\. A little slime is not the end of the world. It’s annoying as fuck, sure, but she’ll get over it.

2\. It’s okay to still be mentally ill. She loves Holtz and Abby and Patty but they aren’t the cure to her illnesses, and they won’t ever be. She’ll always have this, no matter how wonderful her friends are.

3\. She’s completely and utterly in love with Jillian Holtzmann, and it’s not the end of the world.

The thing about number three is that it took her most of the year to come to the realisation that it’s okay to be in love with one of her best friends. She spent eight or nine months lamenting over the fact that she’s in love with her fellow buster.

But honestly, now, she’s come to terms with it.

(Honestly).

The only issue left is how on Earth’s she’s going to actually tell Jillian about it. That … well, that she has no idea how to do. But she’s sure she’ll figure it out. Eventually.

To celebrate their one-year-aversary, Abby buys a cake and ices _One year of busting!_ onto it in her sloppy handwriting that Erin honestly kind of loves, and Holtzmann decorates it with sparklers that spell out ERIN in block letters. Patty draws a little lopsided drawing of Holtz, Erin and Abby standing together on the bottom of the cake in pink icing. Both Abby and Erin are frowning, little pink downturned curves for mouths, but Holtz has a smile almost the size of her iced head taking up her face. There’s a little bit of yellow icing in the form of Holtz’s glasses, although they’re pretty smudged, and the drawing is grinning almost as maniacally as Holtz does in person. Erin thinks it’s an accurate representation of the day they met.

They play ‘80s pop songs out of Holtz’s speaker and stand around talking and laughing and eating cake and drinking beer. It’s the perfect way to celebrate a year together — even if it isn’t technically a year together, considering Patty joined the team a little bit later. They’re going to have a Patty party in like, a week, though. They’ve already got a standing order with the cake store.

“Come here often?” Holtz says into Erin’s ear, sidling up beside her. She grins at the joke, obviously finding the reference to their first meeting hilarious. She takes a drink from her beer, putting it down on the table when she’s done.

“Ha ha,” Erin says, but she smiles along with Jillian at the joke all the same. “Just put on the DeBarge and we’ll be right back where we started.”

“That, milady, can be sorted,” she says with a small smirk that makes Erin’s stomach do flips. She leans over and fiddles with her phone which is connected to the speakers for a few minutes, and all of a sudden her ears are filled with the familiar sound of the song she heard when she first met Holtz. “Care to dance?” she holds out her hand for Erin to take, which she gladly accepts.

Holtz guides her into the middle of the room, where there’s space free to dance, and starts twirling Erin around. She pulls her in, grabbing a wrench from a workdesk and singing into it. Erin laughs at the sight — Holtz crooning into a wrench, dancing dramatically and twirling herself around. She drops Erin’s hand and begins parading herself around the room, rolling her shoulders and shaking her hips, and Erin doesn’t think she’s ever seen a sight so attractive. She thinks maybe it’s Holtz’s carefree attitude — the way that she just doesn’t give one shit about what anyone else thinks about her — that’s so hot, but she can’t be sure.

“Come on, Gilbert!” she yells, shimmying towards Erin. “Get over here and dance with me!”

And so against everything she would normally do, Erin finds herself doing a sort of jump towards Holtzmann, who is dancing on the spot, just waiting for Erin to join her.

They end up dancing together in the middle of the room. Their moves are far from good, but they’re absolutely giddy and they’re having an amazing time and Erin can’t believe how incredible this beautiful, crazy, amazing, insane woman is.

Patty and Abby are dancing along with them now, the two krumping while Jillian spins Erin around the room. Erin’s happier than she’s been in so long, and she’s jumping up and down and laughing with the woman that she loves so, so much, and she knows that tomorrow she’s going to wake up and be the same anxiety ridden Erin Gilbert she’s always been, and she’s going to go back to staring at Jillian when nobody’s looking, but right now, in this moment, she’s so goddamn alive and she can’t even believe it.

“I’m in love with you!” she yells, accidentally letting the words slip past her mouth just as the song crescendos to an end. Everyone in the room freezes, including Jillian.

“Wait, what?” Holtz asks, smile still on her lips.

“I …” Erin says, looking around the room. Abby, Patty and Jillian are all staring at her in disbelief. “Um, I … I thought that the song was … I should go —”

“— Erin,” Holtz says, her voice softening. “Erin, don’t go, okay, we need to talk about this.”

“No, it’s — it’s okay,” Erin says. “I’m gonna go now. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”

“Erin, I love you,” Jillian says, her voice quiet.

Erin turns around, only to be met with the unwithering stare of Jillian Holtzmann. Her eyes are boring into Erin’s, never once blinking. It’s like she’s trying to comfort Erin just with a look, and it’s working.

“What?” Erin asks, her voice catching in the back of her throat.

“I love you,” Holtzmann repeats, a little louder this time.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“And you’re not just saying that because you don’t want things to be awkward, right?”

“Erin, do I strike you as the kind of person who would lie about being in love with you just so I could avoid making things awkward?” Holtz asks.

Erin blushes. She looks to the ground and shakes her head, all of a sudden enjoying the sight of her shoes very much.

“No, I just … nobody’s ever loved me before. Not like that, anyway.”

Her cheeks flush, showcasing her embarrassment over her lack of love for the entire room to see.

“Well, I find that hard to believe,”  
Holtz says. “I mean … you’re awesome, Gilbert.”

“You can call me Erin, you know.”

“I know.”

Jillian takes Erin’s face in hers, pressing her mouth against Erin’s. Holtz’s mouth is warm and tastes like coffee and caramel and Erin’s only had a two second taste of it so far but it’s already her favourite flavour in the world. She kisses her again and again and again, grinning against Jillian’s mouth.

The moment, of course, is interrupted in true Abby fashion, as she awws out loud and shouts, “Erin and Holtzmann sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”

Erin grabs the closest pillow to her and throws it at Abby, succeeding and hitting her square in the face.


End file.
